Revisiting the Sunflowers

These photos are hanging in a show in Taos. An admirer asked me to write a little bit about my process:

The photos were taken during sunflower season in Taos. I was shooting out the passenger window of our car with a 17-40mm Canon 5DMII – we were going about 40MPH. The camera was set for manual focus and the drive mode set to continuous, so I could capture about 4 frames every second. These are the specific settings:

Top photo: 1/125 sec at F/10 ISO 100 20mm

Bottom photo: 1/80 sec at F/7.1 ISO 100 17mm

The reason for the portrait orientation is that I was one-handing the camera, letting it dangle out the window, not sighting through the viewfinder. The blur in the foreground is due to car motion blur, but the background is nominally in focus, due to the small aperture and wide angle lens – the shutter speed was high enough to kill the camera shake, but slow enough to blur those sunflowers zipping by, close to the camera. I did a lot of experimenting with shutter speed to get these nice exposures.